Review: Babylon

Damien Chazelle writes himself into 1920s Hollywood in his fifth feature, Babylon. A three hour drama fueled by fire, piss, shit, and the hysteria of Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, and Diego Calva.

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I believe that all directors are owed the opportunity to make at least one film that indulges the audience in their deepest desires and greatest fears. This type of film typically comes around in the latter part of a career after a director has long established themselves as a pivotal voice of the contemporary arts. A trailblazer of form, identity, and artistic prestige that goes unreplicated. In the case of Babylon, he seems to have jumped the gun, the shark, and taken the piss out of everything we thought we knew about him. Six years removed from Chazelle’s modern love letter to Old Hollywood, La La Land, he communicates with that era again by prying open the eighth gate of hell. As a contrast to La La Land, Babylon is a maelstrom of chaotic despair as compared to the romantic naivety of yesteryear.

Our reverence for Hollywood and the ghosts of the past are associated with the magic of the movies. The functions of the art that we don’t see are less endearing when our only understanding of these people are the movies they star in. The time between rolling cameras is spent lavishing in near ritualistic parties leveled by mounds of cocaine, alcohol, excess, and party fouls. This type of energy is how Chazelle introduces us to a transitioning Hollywood. It’s crude, gross, vulgar, beaded with sweat, sex, and synergy that only the movies could emulate. In a post-COVID world, it is incomprehensible how Chazelle coordinated the suffocating groups of people spitting, shouting, and dancing in an artistically comprehensible manner. Cinematographer Linus Sandgren reteams with Chazelle for a third time to visualize the pervasive gasps of Old Hollywood’s last breaths as a new age is ushered into the fold. Justin Hurwitz, Chazelle’s long-time friend and ace composer, assembles a score composition that rumbles, tumbles, soars, and shocks the film to death before resuscitating it back to life. It is unlike anything I’ve heard in years. This trio opens the doors, locks them shut behind us, siphons everything we thought we loved about the movies and spits it back in our face. Does that sound exhausting? It is.

The love affair with Chazelle seems to have plummeted off a cliff. He followed up his Best Director win for La La Land, with First Man. The lone screenplay in his catalog not written by himself (Josh Singer). It might be Chazelle’s most complete work as his directing talents flourish within the boundaries of someone else’s story. You can see that restraint in his craft, compared to the freedom of directing his own script in the films prior. Chazelle returned to that method, and the overindulgence needed another pass or an additional writer in the room. It’s not a controlled substance, and that may be a compliment to the subject matter, but the script projects very little meaning. His direction does the right amount of lifting, and you can see how comfortable he is directing his own material. The text takes shape through images and sound that someone with an incredible amount of talent understands, but he constantly caves to the worst parts of the story. The elongated, rather repetitive parties feel uproariously childish. In hindsight, it diminishes the intended effect of the story because it continues to exert the same energy at every turn of the page, and through every edit.

Chazelle understands the mysticism of movie sets by connecting the endless parties to the madness of a set. He completely strips the silent era of its allusions by forcing us to endure the reality of the process. The director barks orders, the camera whirs, the set next to them ignites with fire, and explosions from another production intrude, but none of that is a distraction when a film is being made. They’ve avoided their reality and pushed their art forward regardless. Movies, in that context, are an escape from the chaos of their reality, and they can use art as an excuse to ignore it. Chazelle develops this by illustrating the difficulty in transitioning to sound in film. The sets, expectations, and level of work is more detail oriented. The sound of silence on a more modern set is a valuable asset in creating art. When there are intrusions, the repetition of perfecting the craft becomes an emotional obsession. I believe that Chazelle looks at this transition into “talkies” as a dire development in artistic evolution. Hollywood started killing itself to adapt to the new wave of cinematic storytelling and the stars along with it.

Critique became more harmful. The drugs got out of control, and the value of celluloid left minimal room for mistakes. Do I believe that Chazelle manages to juggle all of this in a manner that conveys it properly? No. It’s too broad and overwhelming of a conflict.

There have been relatively apt comparisons to Singin’ in the Rain in how the two films approach a transitioning Hollywood. The difference between a masterpiece like Singing’ in the Rain and Babylon is that the former manages to dilute the broader conflict into a more focused narrative. The commotion of Babylon clearly wants to highlight the cavities of Los Angeles (and live in them), but it ends up not reciprocating anything particularly meaningful or new. It lacks the required nuance to have a conversation with itself about where it wants to go. How Chazelle is going to use the story as a mirror of a progressing art is at once underdeveloped and overinflated because it latches onto these paths that don’t have enough time to interact with each other. Chazelle tells the stories of these artistic martyrs, and a third of the characters often disappear for sizable chunks of the film. They may share the same spaces, but there isn’t any particular interaction that develops these tortured Hollywood souls. They’re victims to the infrastructure of a developing habitat, but that idea is immediately apparent, and the next three hours is a repeated bashing of bottlenecked generalizations and misguided practices.

There’s no way we could watch the filmography of Damien Chazelle and ignore his talent. He has a visible identity, often found in dashing cuts and swift camera movements. When he gets to that final moment of silent, internal catharsis, it is the most relaxed and explosive form of communication without a word being said that becomes the visual linchpin of the entire film. I also believe that he understands the heartbreak of sacrifice at a mature level. It’s a theme throughout all of his films that he breathes onto various stories throughout different periods of our life. He attempts to bring that here, but he reconfigures it to force the world and story to sacrifice the characters for its own gain. Instead of the characters sacrificing a part of themselves by their own doing. It is a curious development, and under that thematic umbrella that all great filmmakers understand, but the placement is contextually bizarre. This is his fifth film; why is this here? As I mentioned before, every director is owed at least one of these, but the implemented perspective is deeply (DEEPLY) naive and myopic. It reads like someone who is upset that this whole showbiz thing isn’t what the movies make it out to be. In that sense, it can play as a fascinating contradiction to La La Land, but the developments of this film contribute virtually nothing to something we already knew. Babylon feels so sudden in that regard. The honeymoon phase must be over, but the conversation is meaningless. You can’t really talk about this film at an intellectually informed level unless it is about all of the functional technical departments that are admittedly impressive. It just reeks of a desperate attempt to try and recreate the image of who we thought Chazelle was as a filmmaker. Like he didn’t have the guts or the gall to make something as conflicting and crude because he fell under the spell of movie magic. 

Simply put; there’s not enough years on him to make a film that is this frustrated by the system. He’s trying to communicate an amalgamation of ideas in a crumbling ivory tower that spirals into a conclusion that has no artistic intelligence or awareness. Is he reveling in the deterioration of humanity in the face of artistic sacrifice again? Kind of, but it feels like it’s trying really hard to exploit the audience’s admiration of film through the most basic level of connection we have to the form. It’s a huge misfire in a film that already has a handful of endings prior, and it’s a sequence that doesn’t really do anything to push the conversation further. This is something he mastered in his previous three films, and it's a trademark at this point, but he tries too hard to make a “finale” that he ends up fumbling. Once more, the script needed another pass.

Babylon is one of those strange movies where it feels harmful to the future of the medium if you denounce it. Movies like this (big budget, singularly directed and envisioned pieces of work) aren’t being funded right now. If so, rarely. In that regard, I’m happy a film like this was made, but the horizons are much too broad for a film that expresses the point far too early. When a film makes it so easy to grasp at what the film is saying, the rest of it isn’t “gravy”. It’s tedious, overbearing, and pointless. Unlike his other films, he doesn’t build to this emotional culmination that contradicts the audience’s feelings to create a satisfying experience. Great filmmakers have the ability to do that, and I’d say that Damien Chazelle is one, but this film is not a part of those ranks. It is an artistic oddity and odyssey through the frantic images of 20th century filmmaking that has nuggets of value in a catacomb full of carcasses. 

Perhaps our body is to be buried under the avalanche of excess, desire, and manipulation as a viewer, but I’m far too optimistic about film for this one to make me feel like a martyr.